NEW RESOURCES

University of Southampton: New Index shows regions in the north have higher risk of food insecurity. “The Index was developed for more than 30,000 neighbourhoods across England with populations between 1,000 to 3,000 people. The index calculates food insecurity risk for all areas based on benefits claimants and low-income at a household level, as well as data on mental health and adult educational attainment.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ars Technica: Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed. “The first steps toward winding down Manifest V2 were supposed to start January 2023, but as 9to5Google first spotted, Google now says it delayed the mandatory switch to Manifest V3 and won’t even have a new timeline for a V2 shutdown ready until March.”

Wall Street Journal: Twitter’s Advertising Truth Hurts. “Activity on Twitter’s ad manager, a subdomain of Twitter’s ad platform sites that specifically hosts those creating or monitoring ad campaigns, declined nearly 74% in October from a year earlier, according to [Similarweb’s] data. In November, visits fell 85% on the same basis—the largest ad traffic decline since Twitter’s change of hands.”

USEFUL STUFF

How-To Geek: How to Access .onion Sites (Also Known as Tor Hidden Services). “Website addresses that end in ‘.onion’ aren’t like normal domain names, and you can’t access them with a normal web browser. Addresses that end with “.onion” point to Tor hidden services on the ‘deep web’.” The article notes that despite the name, onion sites can be less than savory and therefore shouldn’t be browsed, just accessed with a specific destination in mind.

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Atlantic: Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors. “The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby. James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Ars Technica: Effective, fast, and unrecoverable: Wiper malware is popping up everywhere. “Over the past year, a flurry of destructive wiper malware from no fewer than nine families has appeared. In the past week, researchers cataloged at least two more, both exhibiting advanced codebases designed to inflict maximum damage.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Newswise: Internet treatment for anger works. “Problems with managing anger can have severe consequences for the afflicted individual and their loved ones. A new study from the Centre for Psychiatry Research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that four weeks of therapy delivered over the internet can help people with anger and aggression. The results have been published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.” The researchers noted that contrary to many studies, it was very easy for them to get volunteers for this study.

Google Blog: Using new technology and old books to combat disease. “Hundreds of millions of people are affected by insect-borne diseases every year, and climate change is only making the problem worse. Increases in temperature and rainfall have expanded the range of insects, including ticks and mosquitos, contributing to outbreaks of diseases such as dengue fever, lyme disease and malaria. Where can humanity find answers to the newest challenges? One idea: old books.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

The Guardian: What was Dracula really like? 550-year-old clue to life of Vlad the Impaler emerges. “On a dark and stormy night in May this year, exactly 125 years to the day that Bram Stoker published the definitive vampire novel, two people pored over a document more than 500 years old in a room in Transylvania – signed by Dracula himself. Gleb and Svetlana Zilberstein’s mission? To extract genetic material from the letters written by Vlad Dracula – the historical inspiration for Stoker’s vampiric count – left there by his sweat, fingerprints and saliva.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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